Spring 2024
From the President
Rick Throop MSTA President
As we move into 2024, I hope that all of you had a wonderful holiday season and found the new year to be starting off well. There hasn’t been much of a winter here in Michigan so I’m sure most of you, like myself, have been capitalizing on that. I keep a close watch on the road restrictions map and it doesn’t look like that’s going to be much of a worry for a lot of us this year.
MSTA had its 3rd Annual Conference in Mount Pleasant at Soaring Eagle Casino that many of you were able to attend. We were in a much larger room that gave us plenty of space for all of our goings-on at the same time. With a total of 32 vendors, we were able to have many new vendors this year and hopefully more for next year. We also had many returning vendors that continue to support MSTA year after year. Our conference had a total of 271 attendees that were able to obtain 15 credits for the entire conference. Some vendors that I would like to mention and thank are Ashland Pump and Advance Pump and Equipment for sponsoring the Meet and Greet Reception on Monday evening and Best Enterprises and Imperial Industries for generously sponsoring portions of the Annual Banquet on Tuesday evening. Something new that we did this year was a podcast during our lunch that you can listen to or watch at https://youtu.be/YstMsXEVqSQ or search it on www. dirtbagspodcast.com. This was done by Luke Eggebraaten, cofounder of Dirt Bags Podcast, with MSTA VP Jason Spangle and Secretary Dervin Witmer joining in. A big thank you to engcon
for sponsoring this event. MSTA again had our Annual Banquet on Tuesday night where we had our auction with our amazing auctioneer Jeff Hammersmith, from Ashland Pump, who always makes things fun. As always, a big thanks to Jeff for doing that and the many people who bid on items to help support MSTA. We also did our 50-50 and had some gift card giveaways. We were all able to enjoy a good dinner with some good networking and a lot of fun. We will also be having our Spring Meeting on April 13th as well. The meeting with be in Mason at Michigan Septic and is being hosted by MSTA board member Casey Fiedler and member Matt Gustafson. I want to again thank all our vendors, speakers, and anyone else who helped at our conference to make it such a huge success. The Annual Conference continues to grow every year and that would not be possible without the participation of everyone involved and working together. I encourage anyone who has a topic they would like discussed or a vendor you would like to see please let any MSTA board member know or email Karlyn Wickham at executiveofficer@msta.biz and we will do what we can to have them there in February of 2025. Lastly, I would like to thank YOU, our members, for your continued support of MSTA. Your support and friendship are what makes our association what it is today. Best of luck this year with your family, health, and business! Thank You, Rick Throop MSTA President